CHAPTER XIX.

AN OLD FRIEND.

The white hoar frost which had given a fairy-like beauty to the old orchard trees of Nutfield had long melted away, and was replaced by the first powdering and fluttering of green on the grey gnarled boughs.

The birds which Lady Bell had fed no longer came hopping to door and windowsill, but, independent of her bounty, and forgetful of past favours, broke off the acquaintance, and gave themselves up to satisfactory poking for worms in the soft earth, to energetic pecking at the first midges and green flies, and to the absorbing delights of pairing.

Summer company might be anticipated to fill the spare rooms at Nutfield. But Miss Kingscote, though not so graceful and winning in her ways as Lady Bell’s feathered friends, was more faithful, and less carried away by the claims of her personal history, in the association which had remained unbroken since Lady Bell had communicated the fact of her marriage.

Miss Kingscote made up her mind to retain Mrs. Barlowe as a companion, “for, Lud! I’ve growed fond of her.” Miss Kingscote told herself in a succession of reflections, “it would cost me summat to part with her. Besides, what would become of the wench herself, as is pure genteel and dandily, though she do have the smartest fingers, and the prettiest devices, if she were cast out into the world, may be to be driven back on the tender mercies of her villain of a man. I do have a spite at them men; except my Master Charles—he’s a good sort, as well as a pretty fellow, to make his sister’s heart glad, and other lasses’ hearts sad. But this lass she knows that she and Master Charles can’t at no price come together, since she’s neither a rank fool nor a base hussy, and he’s not an abandoned rakish rascal, God bless him! She’s a safe playfellow for Master Charles, as well as good company for me.

“She’ll help me in the knotted fringes for the curtains of them beds. She has begun covers for the spare chairs, which ain’t half finished, and which I could no more complete all alone than I could dance a minnuee. I want a hand, too, in the sets out when the folks staying in the house step in to sup with Master Charles and me; and I am no great shakes at the preserving and pickling which summer do bring on heavy, since old nursey would never let me try, so long as she could have a finger in the pie. I can prank myself fine enough, but Master Charles he’s besotted with the last modes, and he lays into me to take Mrs. Barlowe’s word in the matter. Well, I’m not misdoubting that, wheresoever, and at whatsoever loss the poor thrown-away thing learnt it, she knows the fashions of the top company.”

Thus Lady Bell lived on at Nutfield, and shared the agreeable stir which followed the first announcement of the season of lodgers to the house.

“It’s the mayor’s wife have sent out a messenger express that the rooms are wanted for a Lon’on lady the mayor knows on (we only make our house free to friends and friends’ friends, Mrs. Barlowe), a young madam newly lain in with her first child, and seeking quiet and country air to recruit her,” was Miss Kingscote’s important tidings.

“Our air is as sweet as a nut,” Miss Kingscote animadverted in her satisfaction, “as your colour may show. When you came first I could compare you to nought for wanness but the puling white July flower, and now you are getting that rosy you’ll soon match its red brother and sister.”

Only one word of the news kept tingling in Lady Bell’s ears, “Lon’on!” Could this lady be high enough in rank to know any member of Lady Lucie’s old set? Might the stranger, after they had been several weeks together, be induced to favour and help Lady Bell, if she revealed her identity and appealed to the new-comer’s benevolence?

She knew that she could not live at Nutfield always. Nay, she was determined against remaining there for any length of time. However hazardous a farther encounter with the world, she would face it, rather than sink into slothful apathy and degeneracy, and be dragged down at last to Miss Kingscote’s clownish level.

The next information was brought by Miss Kingscote after she had been to Lumley and seen the mayor’s wife. It struck more home where Lady Bell was concerned.

“Murder! how comes it,” cried Miss Kingscote, not waiting to divest herself of her yellow pelisse and her hat tied down over her lappets, but sitting brandishing a whip, to the danger of Lady Bell’s eyes, on the first chair which Miss Kingscote could drop into after coming back to her own parlour, “that Nutfield should be a refuge for distressed wives? Sure Master Charles and me is neither husband nor wife, that we should draw such a lot, like honey draws flies. Our lodger to be, is parted from her husband too! though they do say it is by her own doing. She were a great fortune, and he were a grand beau, and they pulled together none so amiss for a time. But he ran mad for play, as the Lord deliver Master Charles from running, which led him into all sorts of evil courses.”

“Ah, well-a-day. And was there no remedy?” besought Lady Bell, greatly interested.

“Ne’er a one. For a few weeks gone, just afore the child came into this weary world, when its father’s heart might have been tender, he clean kicked over the traces. He had vowed and swore Bible oaths that he would leave off play, more by token her fortune were none of his; but he went and staked a part on’t with a Warwickshire gentleman, a known gambler and cheat—I’se warrant on his last legs, one Squire Godwin.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Lady Bell again, more shrilly this time; but Miss Kingscote took no notice of the peculiar cadence of the voice, or only attributed it to her own eloquence and the pathos of her story.

“Our madam’s man lost; serve him right. She went and paid his debt, but she would have nothing more to say to him. She broke with him from that hour. High time when the last of her fine fortune would have gone like so much leavings to the dogs, and she and her child would have been drove to work or beg for a bite and sup, if they had stayed on with the slippery ne’er-do-well. But she must be hard in the head and mortal stern in the will to cut the scamp, for they do say she married him against the will of her friends, and was as dead set on him once on a day, as she is now set again him.”

“Poor young madam!” lamented Lady Bell in her old-fashioned abstracted fashion, “so she, also, became exposed, through her husband, to the inhuman selfishness of Squire Godwin. Can you tell me her name, Miss Kingscote?”

“Not I, for I forgot to ax it, and Mrs. Ironside forgot to tell it. What a ninny she would think me for not minding her she had forgot! But perhaps the unhappy lady is keeping it close, though we cannot let that be; we cannot manage a bill without a name, can we now, Mrs. Barlowe?”

“I think we might,” Lady Bell re-assured the mistress of the house.

“And had you heard tell afore of that thief of the wood, Squire Godwin?” inquired Miss Kingscote, reverting to a point which had struck her in her companion’s speech.

“I had heard of him; would that I had not,” admitted Lady Bell, wincing. “But madam, he was not a common swindler and cheat—not to my knowledge. He was a hardened gambler, and a wickedly callous gentleman, that was all.”

“I reckon it was the worser of the two, with the devil to pay atween them,” asserted Miss Kingscote rather severely for her. “I am a born lady, I am, but I count them ruffians of the green boards and race-courses, as may yet turn out the light pockets of my boy and shake ’em emptier of Nutfield than ever our uncle Mat shook ’em, a dratted deal worse than a highwayman, or a housebreaker that may be catched in the act, and wear a hempen collar at Tyburn or nigher hand any day.”

“I suppose we must leave both spendthrifts and wicked uncles to their deserts,” said Lady Bell. “Why are uncles worse than other relations, I wonder?” she speculated.

“Because of them blessed Babes in the Wood,” answered Miss Kingscote glibly.

“Miss Kingscote, let us try to comfort the poor young madam, with her worse than fatherless babe,” suggested Lady Bell, as she conjured up a host of pensive recollections.

“Ay, ay; I expect you two will be as thick as peas,” said Miss Kingscote, nodding confidentially.

The lady arrived that very evening to supper. She had posted from town to Lumley; she had heard there that lodgings were provided for her by the mayor, who was the son of a former bailiff in her family, and had come straight on, in the chaise, with her child and attendant.

Miss Kingscote, who was apt to be in a muddle, and never ready for anything, was, as she described it, “slipping” into her best gown. Master Charles was out. “Oh, the dickens! the dickens! What ever is to be done?” cried Miss Kingscote to Mrs. Barlowe. “Run like a lovey, you are always as neat as though you’d been lifted out of a box, and wait on madam at the coach door. Say we’re main glad to see her, which we beant not yet awhile; but them’s the words. Help her out; take the child, and call it a pretty lamb. The mother won’t go and mind ceremony then. I wouldn’t for my life she did mind, ’cause of the mayor’s people. See the whole set to their rooms, Mrs. Barlowe. Swear the beds are aired, the fire will be lit as soon as we can say Jack Robinson, and we ain’t at the mercy of bugs. I’ll be there to bid madam make herself at home in a trice.”

Lady Bell went out in the early summer dusk, with a new moon coming out calm and sweet, and the blackbirds singing a late note to their mates in the nests among the orchard boughs, unwotting of the shots and snares which were in store for them. Here were a different night and place, with a very different major domo and chatelaine from what had greeted Lady Bell when she came to St. Bevis’s.

“I have been sent to bring you in, madam,” said the fresh young voice to the occupants of the chaise, who were only to be guessed at in its recesses; but the travellers must have thought that the voice spoke very delicately and gently, with a heartfelt sympathy in its liquid undertones. “You must be done up with fatigue, but rest and refreshment are at hand. Let me take the child, I shall be very careful.”

The lady within did not respond immediately. She sat arrested for a moment. Then she got out quickly, directed the nurse to carry the infant within doors from the dews, but declared that for herself, she desired a mouthful of fresh air, and a turn backwards and forwards after being so long shut up in the chaise, before she entered the house and sat down to supper. She took Lady Bell’s arm and drew her into the orchard instead of into the entrance-hall, while her maid and Miss Kingscote’s servants fraternised on the spot over the “whimsies” of fine ladies.

The two shipwrecked young creatures—the stranger in the wraps was only a few years older than Lady Bell—thus thrown together, stood in the twilight orchard discovered to each other, as they had been after the first moment of their meeting again, ready to make common cause as they had done ere now, to league together against their enemies and the whole world.

“Lady Bell Trevor,” said Mrs. Sundon—the voice had a jarred and broken tone, instead of its old full harmony—“I have found you at last. How did you come here? What are you doing here since—since Squire Trevor lost his election? You’ll never refuse to tell me, for I must be your best friend, with whom your secret is safe.”

But Lady Bell was overcome by identifying her old idol whom she had served to the utmost, in this figure whose pedestal was shattered and its companion figure gone for ever. Lady Bell gave way far more than the speaker had failed in composure, and sobbed and cried, “Oh, Mrs. Sundon, I thought you were happy, if anybody on earth was happy, and now to hear and see you like this!”

“Hush! hush!” enjoined Mrs. Sundon, with nervous firmness, as one who would not listen lest her own hardly-won calmness should be ruffled to its depths. “It is the common lot, like death, that we should be deceived and wronged; if there are exceptions, they are so rare, that what right had I, or my friends for me, to count on my forming one? I have not lost all when I have found you.”

On the couple’s repairing to the house, they gave no signs of any previous acquaintance, and Lady Bell was Mrs. Barlowe to Madam Sundon.

Miss Kingscote did not suspect any collusion; she was so easily blinded, that there was no credit in blinding her. She had made up her mind from the first that Madam Sundon and Mrs. Barlowe, in right of their common misfortunes as wives, would be, according to her own phrase, “as thick as peas,” she only congratulated herself on her penetration when her prophecy was fulfilled.

She was not jealous, her mingled good nature and self-conceit constituted a panoply against jealousy, while the mutual attraction between the ladies relieved her from the obligation of entertaining the mayor’s friend.

Master Charles had a little more knowledge of the world, but it seemed to him the most natural thing possible, that two elegant young women belonging to another order from that of a good soul like his sister Deb, with a similarity in misfortune, serving farther to unite them, should be irresistibly drawn to each other. He would have been astonished if they had kept apart.

He was not struck by the spontaneousness and equality of the friendship. He did not pause to think that Madam Sundon, who had the reputation with the mayor’s family of being high as well as gracious, and determined and discreet even to hardness, in breaking with her forsworn infatuated husband, was not a likely person to rush without a sufficient motive into an intimate friendship with a young woman in Mrs. Barlowe’s position. The mere circumstance that Mrs. Barlowe’s presence at Nutfield was an abnormal element of daily life, was enough to convince Master Charles that it would fit into the other abnormal elements, as a necessity of the case.

While Miss Kingscote and Master Charles accorded their ready consent to the connection, it would be difficult to tell its preciousness to Lady Bell. It was like sunshine irradiating a dull landscape, like water springing up in a desert, like the restoration of an alien to forfeited privileges, never before held so dear.

The atmosphere of high-bred and refined society was regained. A sense of reliance in the presence of a powerful friend was experienced. The delightful tie of sisterhood, to which Lady Bell had not been born, was acquired. The wholesome antidote of passionate interest in and deep pity for another, tried as sorely as Lady Bell had been tried, was supplied. Lady Bell had the constant example of Mrs. Sundon’s dignified reserve and womanly fortitude. She shared in the higher intelligence of her friend. She received from Mrs. Sundon many pieces of information for which she had been secretly longing. She found the most charming plaything in Mrs. Sundon’s baby.

Such were some of the many benefits which Mrs. Sundon’s unexpected appearance on the scene brought to Lady Bell, and for which she gave thanks.

Mrs. Sundon was never “high” to Lady Bell; not only was she too magnanimous and loyal a woman to forget old service, because its gain had passed away—there was balm to the woman’s wounded spirit in the girl’s enthusiastic admiration and firm faith.

Only slightly separated in years, both of them wives, and unhappy wives, Lady Bell was still half a lifetime younger in experience than Mrs. Sundon.

Next to her child, Lady Bell became the consolation and interest of Mrs. Sundon’s life—blighted by a blight of which she could not speak. Lady Bell, too, had been wounded by the hunters, but her wound had not been dealt by the hand of a friend, and had not pierced to the quick. Mrs. Sundon could not only cherish Lady Bell, she could devise plans for the girl’s restoration to life and happiness.

END OF VOL. I.

VIRTUE AND CO., PRINTERS, CITY ROAD, LONDON.

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=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:=

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Perceived typos have been silently corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.